


Life After You

by smalldisasters



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, M/M, Marik living a normal life, Non-Explicit Sex, POV Multiple, POV Third Person, Post-Canon, Thiefshipping, identity stealing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-21 08:46:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13737294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smalldisasters/pseuds/smalldisasters
Summary: Marik is out of the Tomb for good, he's out living his life in the real world, or trying to. With the fears and traumas on his back, and the ghost of his only friend missing somewhere in the dirt, he's struggling to move forward.Ryou only wants to make amends to the Spirit of the Ring, and will stop at nothing to find peace for them both.And Yami Bakura is in hell, trying to claw his way out.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay hi! I'm really in the writing thing rn, so I thought I'd work on something I started ages ago. This is the first long YGO! fic I've done, but hopefully you'll enjoy it :)

It was three in the morning and The Ruby Cherry was still bubbling, the patrons of the expensive bar made their last orders, and Marik expertly shook cocktails in time to the blasting club music, poured rainbows spiked with vodka and tequila, and flirted relentlessly with the customers. His Egyptian skin had darkened when it drank up the sun of the outside world, and his blond hair glowed with the violet neons above the bar. His lavender eyes and roguish smile had the women leaning over the bar to fill up his tip jar. He charmed and chatted his way through the night into the early mornings, until the club was shutting and the lights were starting to come up, the music fading out. He usually left the bar with the back pocket of his tight jeans containing the numbers of rich women and men, looking for a lay with the beautiful boy. Beautiful, he knew he was, but he had little interest in the older people who winked and told him to call them. In all truth, through his shameless flirting, he wasn’t sure what he wanted. He’d spent almost his whole life in the tomb, and being attracted to people was something he hadn’t been sure how to approach, for all his charisma and confidence.

When all the people, men in suits, women in cocktail dresses, as the dress code enforced, had spilled from the club, Marik leaned back against the bar and stretched. He grinned at his co-workers, all relaxing now that the building was empty. They cleared up mostly in silence, exhausted from the night’s work. Cleaning was Marik’s least favourite part of the job, but in a way, the quiet and the peace was soothing after another hectic Saturday night. Well, it was into Sunday morning now, but it meant he was finished until Thursday evening came around again.

He pulled his jacket on and chatted idly to the other staff, waiting for five o’ clock to roll around so they could leave, officially off the clock.

Marik had taken the job less for necessity, more just to experience what the real world was like. He’d grown bored hanging around his flat by himself, and had decided to get out and see what people did when they hadn’t spent their entire lives underground. He liked the company of his co-workers, and the attention of the customers. All he’d had for company for the vast majority of his life was his older siblings, so there was something to be relished in speaking to other people. He’d been out of the tomb for a little over two years, and there was still so much to be discovered about the world.

He started up his bike, and made his short way back to his apartment, the excitement and socialisation of the night wearing off as he drove. It was a cloudy, overcast night, and he was tired, so when he let himself into his apartment, he didn’t bother to turn the lights on, just went straight to his bedroom and stripped for bed.

He worked three nights a week simply to have something to do. It seemed small and sad, but Marik had never had a future to plan for – he was meant to live and die in the tomb, his sole purpose to hold the eighth key in an ancient prophecy. However, the purpose had been fulfilled and left him empty in its stead. Without any future expected, he hadn’t made solid plans. Of course, as a child he’d dreamed about it, what he’d do if he escaped his fate, imagining travelling the world, marrying a beautiful girl, seeing incredible things he couldn’t even imagine. He was still adjusting to the strange freedom he found himself in.

He’d only been in a couple of bars when he’d applied for the job. The owner was uncertain when he’d explained he’d had no job experience of any sort, let alone bar work, but he learned fast, and after shadowing another worker for a few days, he quickly picked up the work, finding it simple and straightforward. It wasn’t exactly fulfilling work, and it wasn’t of any great importance, but it was something to do, and it gave him a sense of purpose he was lacking. 

Despite the many months since he had broken into the daylight, he was still having nightmares about waking up in the darkness, the carved skin of his back burning. He was still unsure of where to go or what to do. He was still afraid that his dark self still resided in his mind, waiting for him to drop his guard. There was still too much uncertainty and doubt to be ready to allow himself to truly explore outside of his comfort zone, which currently was a small flat close to where Isis and Odion were living. He knew he wanted to live on his own, to gain his independence, but couldn’t bring himself to be too far away from familiarity. So the best he found for himself was to take a job at a high-end club, something to fill the hours of his empty days. The money was hardly needed, the Ishtar family were well paid for their commitment to the pharaoh, and his Rare Hunters had brought him plenty more. He wasn’t alone in the desire for work – Isis and Odion had both taken up working with archaeological teams and museums to learn more about the ancient history of their county, keen to learn more about their duties underground, or perhaps to add meaning to what had contained them for so much of their lives. Marik didn’t know the reason, and he had been the black sheep of the three again, and preferred to distance himself from the history they’d been trapped inside. He was far more occupied about learning about modernity. All his teachings when he was in the tomb had revolved around what happened thousands of years ago, and he was ready to know what was happening _now._

There were a great deal of firsts when he had gotten out of the tomb, and the amazement in his one sneaking trip out with Isis as a child had not been damped when he finally left for good, many years later. He was driven by purpose and fate, of course, when he left as a teenager, but still so much about the outside world was new and fascinating. He’d seen a great deal of it in the minds of all the people he’d controlled, learned a lot very fast, but it wasn’t the same as experiencing it. Learning about things like plants and animals were all well and good, but teachings didn’t mean anything at all the first time he stroked the coarse mane of a horse, or the soft fur of a cat. The picture of a motorbike he kept hidden in his belongings was nothing compared to the sound of the engine underneath him and the sensation of wheels on the dirt, or the unexpected nerves he felt when he learnt how to drive it. It hadn’t occurred to him he’d have to _learn_ how to use a motorbike, and when he invaded someone’s mind to steal the knowledge, it took him some time to be able to apply it in practice.

But possibly more than even the bike, nothing prepared him for the stars at night, to travel out to an empty stretch of desert in the sleepless hours of the early morning, long before dawn, and lie on the hard ground and simply watch. He felt like he could see into forever and back, as the open sky held millions of stars, glittering against the silken black. Sometimes it was a break from thinking, when everything was too much, and he was hurting from loss, and afraid of the shadows, and lost without purpose, he could lay beneath the stars and nothing would really matter too much anymore. Even his thoughts kept travelling their paths, he felt less worried, like they were thinking about themselves, and were of no real concern to him.

It was silent and beautiful and breathing pure air.

When he couldn’t sleep, he would ride his bike out to the open fields on dirt tracks to watch the stars until the sun came up, however, on this cloudy night, there’d be nothing to see. Tired though he was, his thoughts weren’t ready to leave him yet. He didn’t want to dwell any more on his loneliness and he was trying to ignore a quiet tug of a grief he refused to acknowledge, but as he lay awake between the sheets, it always came back to haunt him like the ghost he grieved for.

He had spent scant weeks with the spirit of the Millennium Ring, and that had been a first for him too – realising that it wasn’t just girls that were beautiful, although he somehow felt that was not something he ought to think, even if it was true of Bakura, or perhaps it was true of Ryou, as it was his face and pale limbs Marik admired after all. But from what he’d heard, Ryou was soft expressions and a gentle tone, and it was something about the juxtaposition of the hard edges that Bakura added to the pretty vessel that charmed him. And then he’d found out what an irritating, self-centred shit he could be, but his shameless self-awareness on the matter was appealing in its own right. He was abrasive, short-tempered, aggressive, Marik could spend an eternity listing Bakura’s atrocious qualities, but it never overrode the fact that he was a partner, a friend, and actually really enjoyable to be around.

Marik knew if he’d ever had any other friends, he probably wouldn’t have ever cared about Bakura, but he found Yugi’s offer of friendship grating and twee. Maybe he was just too unkind for that sort of caring relationship. As the one chosen to bear the scroll, he’d been spoiled by Isis, and an outright master to Odion, and in a way, it worried him about what building new relationships would be like. Were there more people as blunt and cynical as Bakura? Would there be other people he would want to spend time with? He found socialising largely exhausting, as something he’d hardly done in the first sixteen years of his life, when he’d gone out and tried to get to know new people, he hadn’t really understood how. The relationships he had with his siblings were comfortable and unconditional, and they all knew each other as well as themselves. He’d had his whole life with very few people, and now new people were unpredictable, variable and confusing.

He’d almost expected other people to click with him the way Bakura had, in the way that spending time with him was easy. However, other people had not been so up front about what they wanted and expected. People were polite and kind instead of being honest, much the way Marik himself had been when he was calling himself Namu. He knew, logically, that not everyone was just pretending to be nice to get what they wanted, but there was a definite sceptical slant on his view.

He tried to put the thoughts out of his head, glumly mooning over Bakura was not going to somehow magically bring him back.  Not that he hadn’t tried. He’d read about rituals and spirit magic, but Heka was unresponsive to him without his Millennium Rod, now secured in a museum collection after Isis had demanded he handed it over. He didn’t really know the first thing about spells anyway. Not for the first time, his mind drifted to Ryou Bakura. Bakura had mentioned that his Duel Monsters card deck was built by his host, and Bakura had just modified it a little, adding new, more powerful cards to the occult deck. He’d mentioned before his interest in magic and the undead when Marik had asked what the boy was like. Bakura had made a disgusted kind of noise, and said he was annoying, always sticking up for his useless friends, and liked to try to push into Bakura’s consciousness to talk to him.

Marik folded his arms and frowned at him.

“You can’t blame him, given that you’re literally possessing him right now? What makes you any better than my shadow-self?”

“You don’t know him,” Bakura snapped.

He hadn’t given him a real answer though, in fact, he hadn’t spoken to him for the rest of the day. The conversation was what came into his head when he thought about asking Ryou for help. He was probably relieved to be out of the spirit’s chokehold on his consciousness. There was no way he’d help bring him back, even if he could. He didn’t even want to ask.

Ryou had gotten in touch with him after the final duels, and their darker halves were both banished.

_Ryou Bakura wants to add you as a contact!_

The little Skype bubble had popped up in the corner of his computer screen, and he’d just stared at it, his heart pounding, until it went away again. After all the duels, Yugi had wanted to keep in touch, and Marik, at a loose end, had agreed, only to find there was no way of doing so. He didn’t really have a home any more, let alone modern technology. He had seen Bakura using Ryou’s mobile phone, and when Marik had decided he wanted to experience everything about the modern world, he’d bought one, and a laptop too. Isis had fitted much easier into the world, and they muddled through setting it up together.Yugi had given him his phone number and Skype address, and Marik had downloaded it and added him, only to block him days later. After the shock of everything had worn off, he’d come to his senses and realised that he had no desire to speak to Yugi Motou again. He mostly used the internet to find new places to travel to, and new places to explore.

A week later, he hesitantly opened the window and accepted his request, typing back to his messages.

_Ryou: Hi Marik. I’m Ryou Bakura, we haven’t met. I got your contact from Yugi, I hope that’s okay._

_Marik: yeah thats fine. weve met in a way_

_Ryou: I guess so. I’ve seen you when my Yami was in control, so I know a little about you._

_Marik: bakura told me a bit about you too_

Marik waited. He wasn’t sure what to say – should he apologise for residing in his body against his will? Should he apologise for having him stabbed? Nearly killed? Being sent to the shadow realm? Being accomplice to keeping him confined to his soul room in the way that he himself despised? What could he even say to the vessel of his old partner, the vessel that he barely recognised as a living person? How could he even begin to apologise?

_Ryou: I’m sorry for what happened. I really didn’t want to have my yami banished._

He was no further forward, and now confused as to why _Ryou_ of all people was apologising.

_Ryou: I just wanted him to find peace. He wasn’t as awful as everyone said, but I think you knew that too?_

_Marik: i think he did what he had to_

_Ryou: Yeah. He had his reasons. But you got on with him._

_Ryou: Or as much as anyone can._

_Ryou: He liked you._

_Marik: oh_

Marik’s fingers lingered over the keys, wondering what to type back. Dozens of replies flittered through his mind, but they all came back to the same one: talking to Bakura’s host about him was painful.

_Ryou is typing…_

The message disappeared.

_Ryou is typing…_

The message disappeared again.

_Ryou is typing…_

_Ryou: So are you back in Egypt now? I heard you saying you wouldn’t be going back to the tomb._

Marik breathed a sigh of relief and told Ryou about his place. They talked about work, and Ryou said he had gone to college. They chatted for a little longer, and Marik discovered that Ryou actually knew quite a lot about him, and he suspected that he had more access to Bakura’s thoughts and experience than Bakura knew. He started to get the idea that the host was stronger willed than Bakura had let on, and when he thought about it later, he realised that he’d have to be resilient to be able to host a powerful spirit like Bakura. They’d spoken a few times since then, and Marik was starting to like him.

_Ryou: I was thinking about coming to Egypt. I’d like to see it as a tourist instead of a pawn._

_Ryou: Can we meet?_

_Ryou: Marik?_

But Marik was frozen. An image of Bakura’s face flashed in his mind and his stomach twisted. He tried to picture what Ryou’s expressions might look like on that face and he didn’t like it. He knew he was being ridiculous – it was Ryou’s face, but he’d only ever seen Bakura with it and he couldn’t face seeing Bakura’s body without Bakura inside it. He closed the window and shut the lid of the laptop, putting it to sleep.

He didn’t answer his messages again.


	2. Chapter 2

“Bakura!”

The world came sharply back into focus at the call of his name, and Ryou looked up as Yugi waved, grinning, as he came closer, Tea following him. Ryou was sitting outside the café drinking a cup of coffee. He’d arrived early, to mentally prepare himself. He knew friends weren’t supposed to take up so much energy to be with, but he figured it was just another thing he couldn’t quite get right. He smiled warmly at his friends as they took chairs at the table.

“No sign of Joey and Tristan?” Yugi asked, looking around for them.

“Not yet. That would involve them being on time.”

“Typical,” sighed Tea.

“How are you?” Ryou asked. It had been a few weeks since he’d seen any of them, mostly through conflicting schedules, as Ryou had started college, and Yugi worked in his Grandpa’s game shop when he wasn’t at school either. He knew that Yugi was the link between them, and suspected that Joey and Tristan still harboured negative feelings towards him, between what had transpired with the Ring over the last year, and their general distaste for the occult that still interested Ryou. He tried to write those thoughts off as paranoia, and wanted to enjoy the company of his friends instead. He was sure Joey and Tristan would be there soon enough, and they would have a perfectly nice time. He took a breath and smiled at his friends as Tea spoke.

“How was your holiday? Did you have a good time?”

Ryou had lied about his time away. He’d said he was visiting some friends in America, a small town with no notable tourist traps or landmarks he might be expected to talk about. Just some empty little place in the middle of nowhere where some old friends of his had moved to. He did have those friends, and he emailed and Skyped them regularly, but that’s not where he’d been. He’d taken inconveniently timed flights to keep them cheap, taken the last minute cattle class seats and they hadn’t been much at all. He’d stayed one Tuesday night in a hostel, so he hadn’t spent a terrific amount in total on the trip. Even with the visit being as cheap as possible, he knew money would be a little tight for a short while. It had been a fruitless trip anyway. He didn’t quite know what he was expecting, flying all the way over to Egypt, and slipping into the site of the collapsed museum. He’d crept in at night, and lain flat on the dirt and rubble, trying desperately to feel any pull from the Ring, anything that might tug the spirit up out of the ground into his body. He set out a spell, scraping symbols and shapes into the dirt, laying offerings and stones at the appropriate points. He’d worked hard on ensuring his pronunciation was accurate, so when he said the words, clearly and foreign on his tongue they would be heard. But nothing happened. There was no pull from the darkness, no lights of magic being invoked, no nothing. Just his own clipped voice and his own dim shadow. He cleared his throat and tried the second spell he’d been able to find.

Nothing.

He sat down heavily, and felt stupid. It had been a wasted trip, and he should have realised that sooner. He cursed himself and cleared up his stones into his backpack. He scuffed away his markings with the toe of his trainer and went back to the hostel. He stayed awake all night and left early the next morning, and caught the bus to the airport, spending the day around Cairo, half hoping to run into Marik, half hoping he wouldn’t. His flight left at half past eleven at night, and he’d dozed curled up on an airport seat hugging his backpack from nine. He slept a little on the flight on the way home, and it was evening the next day in local time when he got on a bus from the airport to his flat.

He slept for the next three days, regretting making the trip at all, and only dragged himself out of the house another week later to meet up with his friends for lunch on a free Saturday.

Ryou nodded and smiled warmly.

“It was good to catch up with old friends.”

Joey and Tristan crashed into the seats next to them as a waitress came to take drinks orders for Tea and Yugi. Ryou watched her as she took one look at the two boys jostling each other, Joey yelling, and turned around and walked back inside. He didn’t blame her, and wished he could walk away too. He followed the thought up by immediately scolding himself, these were his friends and he needed to try harder to be kind.

Did they have to be so _loud_ though?

They simmered down, and finally got some semblance of a story out of them, something about being chased by a dog, Joey losing a shoe, Tristan trying to distract the dog with sticks… Ryou sipped his coffee.

His mind slipped off the conversation after they ordered drinks and food. He zoned out while they were eating. He lost focus when they were having another coffee. He kept snapping back to reality, realising he’d been thinking about other things, household chores, school work, even about the campaign he was working on in the table-top role-playing group be was in. He was struggling to stay present in the conversation, as he often did in the group. He didn’t mean to be so distant, and his inability to join in on a normal conversation wasn’t helping matters.

Ryou sometimes felt very abnormal. Everyone else seemed to manage fine having a nice lunch and talking about things, catching up with what they’ve done over the past couple of weeks, interesting gossip, usual things, but he seemed to struggle, as if there was still a disconnect between him and the outside world. He knew that the years of not wanting to get close to other people so they couldn’t be hurt by the Spirit of the ring had made him put up those barriers and defences. Maybe they weren’t so easy to take down again. 

After everything they’d been through together, they should have an unbreakable bond, but Ryou wanted to put everything behind him. They didn’t talk about what had happened, except for talking about Yugi’s Yami. For several weeks all they could talk about was Atem, while they were supporting each other through their losses. Yugi, natuirually, took it harder than anyone, as the puzzle had belonged to him, and the mind link they’d had together, the relationship they’d had, the _partnership_ that sometimes made Ryou feel sick when he was scrabbling in the emptiness in his head for any remaining trace of the Spirit that had lived in his body for so long.

Much longer than Yugi and Yami had been together, Ryou sometimes thought bitterly. He’d already been in Domino when the others were surprised at the change in Yugi’s demeanor as Yami had taken over. The Millenium Ring had responded to Yugi’s puzzle the day they met, but when they discussed it, Yugi explained he’d only recently managed to complete the Puzzle. The others were only just starting to get acquainted with Yugi’s dark half, talking about him when Ryou was trying to shake off the last dark holds of possession, only to find out that unless the Spirit of the Ring had duelled someone, they mostly didn’t even notice he had gone. It didn’t happen too often, sometimes the Spirit just felt paranoid, and needed to know what was happening. Sometimes it was to scout out the group’s weakness to plan to snatch the puzzle. Sometimes Ryou could watch through the link between them, but usually the Spirit shut him away in his Soul Room with no outside contact. And as soon as there was any indication that Yami might be present, Ryou was forcefully torn out of conscious control. He wished he could have seen the Spirit’s impression of him. He hoped it was good. He didn’t like to think about the alternative.

And sitting outside the little café on the warm day, drinking black coffee, Ryou resisted rolling his eyes as they laughed about something that happened with Atem, as Yugi was a spirit, invisible to all but his Other, who was relaying his input. Ryou had been shut away, screaming out to the Spirit, trying to get him to listen.

He didn’t mean to be bitter about Atem. He just sometimes felt he’d been dealt an unfair hand in his life, and there were always new ways to screw him over. He harboured a resentment at the care and love Atem had had, and how widely it had contrasted to the dehumanising treatment that he had experienced at the hands of the thief. However, as the time had gone on, they’d started to understand each other, and to find a sort of respect for each other. He had heard comment at the strength of his own soul, that he was able to support a powereful and dark spirit like the Ring’s. Ryou even thought that by the time that Bakura had disappeared, he had almost seen Ryou as a human. He’d protected him, after all. However, when Atem had disappeared, everyone had looked after Yugi’s broken heart, helped him recover. No one had said anything more than ‘good riddance’.

Ryou had had to mourn on his own. Everything that the Spirit had left around his apartment had been boxed up and stored in the back of a cupboard. He wasn’t going to remember him, he told himself. He was going to forget and move on, and write him off as a bad hallucination. Even if they had been starting to form a partnership of sorts. Maybe a strange one, but it was a foundation nonetheless. But he knew he had to forget, because he couldn’t keep remembering.

He tried his best but it wasn’t easy.

“Are you okay, Ryou?”

Everyone was looking at him.

“I wasn’t there that time. I don’t remember it.”

“Yes, you were, you…” Joey started but trailed off, on realising what Ryou meant. A heavy air settled over the group and there was an uncomfortable shift. Ryou half regretted saying anything, but felt a spark of annoyance, that he wasn’t allowed to talk about his experiences when these things happened.

“The Spirit was there instead.”

“Nothing happened - I don’t get it though. Why did it just watch sometimes?” Tea asked with a sigh, and Tristan shifted uncomfortably. Out of all of them, Tristan was most uncomfortable around Ryou, especially when they talked about the Ring.

“Cause it’s just a control freak that wanted to hurt Ryou,” Joey cut in angrily.

“No,” Ryou said sharply and everyone turned to look at him. “He just wanted to know what was happening. He hardly ever hurt me.”

“Hardly ever,” snorted Joey.

“It couldn’t be helped,” Ryou snapped.

“Are you really being sympathetic about it?” Tristan said, astonished. “You can’t say it didn’t screw you up.”

“You didn’t know him. You didn’t know what it was like for him.”

“It was an insane demon spirit, it wasn’t even human!”

“ _He_ was human enough!”

Ryou found himself standing, with his hands flat on the table. His coffee was spilt and his friends were staring.

“Ryou?” started Yugi softly. “Do you miss it- the Spirit?”

“I know he wasn’t like your Yami, but he was… I lost him. He was with me for a long time and I lost him. You don’t understand.”

Tristan was scowling coldly.

“I think it screwed you up more than you think. You must be insane too, to miss what it did to you.”

“Maybe you should get help,” Tea said, very gently, placing a hand on Ryou’s arm to ease him back into his chair. Ryou sat, obediently and looked at the coffee spill on the saucer. He thought to the drawings on the floor, the stacks of books, the stones and the candles and the charms and the tokens. He thought of the Ouija board, the Tarot cards, the letters to Amane, asking her if the Spirit was with her. He thought about the stupid trip and the white haired models on his shelf.

He left the money for his meal on the table and walked away.

He stalked home, head spinning, already regretting lashing out at his friends. They only wanted to help, he knew that, but their attack on the Spirit any time he came up in conversation was exhausting. They wouldn’t even listen. He was starting to really feel like he should get away from them. He had friends in the games club, and at his new college. People who didn’t know he’d once been host to an ancient Egyptian spirit. People who didn’t know what he’d accidentally brought on his friends in the past. They seemed to like him for what he was, and didn’t cast uneasy looks if he said anything too strange. He locked the door to his flat behind him, shutting the world out in the hallway and took a deep breath.   
He had work to do for college, but he wasn’t sure he could concentrate. Instead, he went into the room that had been his dad’s office, but had long since been converted into his games room. He was running his first role playing campaign since he joined the club, which hosted six-week long blocks of RPGs and single session table top games for people who weren’t in the blocks.

He sat down at his desk and opened his laptop and opened the story document, looking over his campaign file on his desk. During the sessions, he noted what the players had done during the game, and when he got home, he wrote it up into fuller notes, creating an ongoing story.

His world was one of spirits, necromagy, and dark magic and the players were trying to find out why people and creatures were disappearing, and why there had been a spike of hauntings in a local area. They had just found a man’s body, all clawed up, and drained of some of his blood. This weekend they would spend four hours choosing their paths from this point. He reread over last week’s session and what he’d written so far about what they might do next week, and started sketching out more plans, sculpting more of the story in advance of their choices.

After a while he realised it had gotten dark, his hand was cramped from writing and his back was stiff. These all came as a sudden revelation even though they’d likely been building over the past few hours. He stretched out, flexing his fingers and cracking his joints. He’d thrown himself full force into his writing and had completed as much as he could without the players’ input. He quickly read over the characters again, and briefly thought about the players in the group. He’d started to make some friends, sometimes going for a drink or dinner after the games, as a local rock bar ran a quiz night. He didn’t know a lot about general knowledge or rock music, but he had a good time nonetheless. He always had someone to talk to, and they seemed to like him. He’d made a couple of friends in his college class, where he was studying Culinary Arts and Bakery.

His friends had seemed surprised when he told them what he was going into, but he loved baking, and dreamed of opening a little café, or a little bakery. Something quiet and peaceful, which was what he craved after the hectic period of being a possessed duelist. He would get to meet people, but never get to close. Although it was safe now, the people around him weren’t at risk of being hurt, or trapped in the Shadow Realm, or in figurines, but it had been such a long time since he trusted himself with others, it was a hard pattern to break.

Finally, at the desk, he wrote a short letter.

 

_Amane,_

_I hope you are okay. Your big brother is having a hard time. I told you I lost the Spirit of the Ring, and to be honest I’ve been trying to bring him back. I know that it’s hopeless and stupid, just like all the time I spent trying to bring you back._

_But the difference is I know you’ve gone to heaven. I know you’ve become an angel, because you were always a good girl, and you always were an angel._

_The Ring Spirit is not. He never was, and I’m not sure he was human enough for the afterlife to claim him. I’m so afraid he’s trapped somewhere in between. But if he’s not completely gone, it means there might be a chance I can bring him back._

_After everything I learned after the accident, I hope something might be useful now._

_Maybe I’m being selfish because I’m lonely. But I just want to be able to save at least one soul._

_I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, but I don’t think you need saving._

_I miss you.  
_

_Love Ryou_

 

He folded the letter in half and slipped it into an envelope. He neatly printed _Amane_ on the front and added the date. He filed it into a box behind all the others. He had started hiding them away in a more discreet fashion after Yugi had happened on a pile of them once. He started asking questions, in his good-natured way, to find out things about Ryou that he’d have rather kept to himself. It wasn’t that he didn’t want his friends to know about him, but he disliked the intrusion into his little sister’s death. He had hardly discussed the car accident after it happened, and his father had thrown himself into his work to cope, accepting more work abroad, taking longer trips, and the older Ryou got, the more out of contact he seemed to be. They never talked about Amane so he remembered her in his own way and kept a box of letters he’d written to her over the years.

Maybe it was stupid how he cared about the Spirit. He didn’t like how he had become more important than his friends, but he had. When locked up in his head, he’d not always stayed in his own soul room. He’d found his way out and explored what he could. He’d found memories in the Ring, and he saw new ones when they dreamed. Their body share had been one or other – he’d never seen the Spirit in person, but he’d caught his reflection when watching from somewhere behind his own eyes. His own face was there in essencnce, but the hard, sharp expressions were strange on his face, and the wild spikes his hair formed were bizzarre. He studied himself hard in the mirror, pulling faces and messing up his hair, trying to recreate the Spirit. He narrowed his eyes and scowled and smirked and bared his teeth, but his face didn’t contort it quite the right way.

_Trying to look like me, Host?_

Ryou jumped and walked away from the mirror. The Spirit wore the same clothes, mostly, save for a long black coat that Ryou had woken up in on several occasions. He didn’t bother throwing it away, accepting that it belonged to the Spirit and hanging it up. But by the time that had showed up, he was used to things appearing in his apartment that didn’t belong to him. At first he’d panicked and stressed about if he was going to get caught, and if people were on the watch for a white-haired thief. But when nothing too expensive was stolen, and no-one ever came looking for him, he stopped worrying so much.   
Realising that actually, despite his terror at the threatening voice in his head and the blackout loss of time, which were then replaced with what felt like hours trapped in a blue room with spellbooks, RPG setups, models, Ouija boards, divining rods and crystals, all useless inside his own head, the Spirit did very little damage. Or at least to other people, he had not forgotten the time he spent in a bed hooked up to an IV, with a deep gash in his arm, after blood loss and exhaustion – apparently the Spirit wasn’t aware human bodies needed rest and food to survive. However, he had heard the end of the duel, where the Spirit refused to allow the host to be hurt, and Atem was going to attack him anyway. He found it hard to mourn Atem’s loss after that.

He looked at the scar on the back of his left hand and flexed his fingers. That had been hard to explain at hospital while they put his bones back in the right place and stitched it all back together. He said he’d fallen onto the metal tower of an elaborate RPG structure, which had miraculously pierced his hand in a way that had pushed the bones and most of the tendons to the sides rather than breaking them in half. That had been in the early days of hearing the voice in his head, when he could still sometimes force his way back into his body, before the Spirit got the hang of possession, and regained enough strength to take complete control.

But the memories he’d seen, that the Spirit hadn’t been able to control when he was stressed or asleep. Ryou didn’t ever tell him he’d seen them, or that he had heard a lot of thoughts over the months. He knew if the Spirit knew, he’d work harder to keep a control on it.

But he’d seen the thief back in his memories before the Ring, of the fire and the soldiers, and it took a long time for Ryou to see enough and piece together the strange nightmares that filled him with so much terror, inexplicably, to realise that these were the Spirit’s nightmare memories. His village, all his people, _Kul Elna,_ said the Spirit in his restless sleep, reciting names, and they eventually came with the impressions of people that he’d once known. Over time, Ryou saw the Spirit became known as the King of Thieves, stealing at first just as a traumatized child in a harsh climate trying to survive as the last of his village, to grow to become a tomb robber, violently against the Pharoah that had ordered the slaughter of his loved ones for the creation of the items, stealing gold and treasure simply to defile the tombs of the monarchy that had torn his life apart.

He caught reflections in shiny surfaces, and Ryou committed the memory of the thief’s face. Dark skin, darker than Marik’s, grey-white hair, his bare chest strong and muscular under his long red coat, and a nasty scar under his left eye. Ryou recognised parts of his own face in the ancient Spirit’s memories.  

Ryou watched helplessly as a desperate teenager formed a pact with an ancient dark creature, and watched as he lost his humanity, as parts of him fell away to revenge and anger.

He felt what the Spirit felt – his entitlement and possessive the Spirit became of the Ring. It was made from his people, it housed his soul for three thousand years, it was _his_. That sense of ownership seeped into Ryou – destiny had meant to him to possess the ring, even if it was so the Ring could possess him, but it was not random chance it had come into his hands. For whatever reason, fate had decided to allow the Spirit a chance of life, and after realising the Spirit was, in his own way, well meaning, he started to feel posseive about the Ring and the Spirit it housed. It was theirs. So when someone took it away, Ryou took it back.

He messaged Marik later that night. They chatted, briefly, uncomfortably before Marik stopped replying altogether when Ryou asked to meet him.

He looked over the spells again, the collection of them he’d made for Amane. He’d added plenty of new ones since, just to keep his collection up to date.

_Ryou: I don’t know if you’re getting these messages, and I don’t know if you want him back._

_Ryou: I’ve been trying all of these spells and rituals to bring him back, and then I started looking at Ancient Egyptian spells. But I realised – these aren’t my gods. They won’t listen to me. The gods and goddesses of magic, life, death, the shadows. They’re_ your _gods and they might help you._

_Ryou: I’m going to give you some information. Do with it what you will. I won’t bother you again, but you can talk to me anytime._

Ryou pasted in the instructions for a spell to bring someone back from the shadows. He didn’t know if that’s exactly where Bakura was, but he hoped Marik would try. He sent instructions on how to open the gate, and stressed the importance of closing it again. He sent lists of the appropriate stones and offerings for each god whose will he would be attempting to incite. He sent everything he could think of, and hoped Marik hadn’t outright blocked him and was still seeing the messages. 

There was nothing else left for him to do, and he stared at his computer screen, hoping Marik would _try._


	3. Chapter 3

The shadow realm was black and filled with infinite unknown horrors. Sometimes it was a nightmare set to high. Sometimes it was nothing at all. It was endless and infinite and forever. It was freezing cold and burning hot and it was hell and Bakura was trapped there.  After the duel, where he’d failed, where he _still_ hadn’t destroyed the Pharaoh, and he’d been cast into darkness, left to wander for immeasurable amount of time, for he had no way of tracking hours and days and weeks, without days and nights. At first, he raged in anger, threatened nothing, silently screamed into the emptiness. Burning tears streamed from his eyes and with no one to see he didn’t fight them back. For a while he simply lay still, unable to move any more, unable to will himself to get up and move on. His purpose and his worth had been drained away, and he felt a strange tear in his soul where he recognised Zorc had been separated from him. He was still angry about everything that had happened, but it was a warmer, more personal anger than the uncontrollable rage that Zorc had filled every edge of him with. It was logical and direct, not the open-ended fury to destroy the whole world he’d had before. He was somehow aware of this difference, but no longer held any interest in studying it. He had nowhere to go now – in this void, when he tried to speak, no sound happened, he had no physical entity to move, he was just an awareness. He didn’t care to think about how long he was going to be trapped here, and he almost longed for his imprisonment inside the ring, where he’d at least had the familiarity of his own dank soul room, and the mazes he’d learned by heart, and all the ghosts for company. He’d been in there so long that he’d lost most of his memories, he’d passed the time by reciting the names and picturing the faces of everyone he could remember from Kul Elna, desperately clinging to the memory of the sounds of their voices as the only means of salvation for his soul. Now, trapped in the darkness again, he tried to say their names, but only met with silence, he forced the thoughts as strong as possible, and then at the end of the list added new names and faces of those he’d lost.

_Ryou Bakura_

_Marik Ishtar_

_Ryou Bakura_

_Marik Ishtar_

_Marik Ishtar_

_Marik Ishtar_

_Fuck._

 

Bakura thought of the host who had forgiven him time and again, no matter what he did, who had taken time to understand what he was doing. And he thought of the _friend_ , the only one he’d had since he was six years old, the only person he’d almost trusted in three thousand years, someone he’d felt equal to, comfortable with, and it had lasted a matter of weeks, driven almost exclusively by revenge and fighting, it hadn’t even mattered. There’d been something that Bakura couldn’t quite identify. A strange kinship with the blond boy, naïve from his years underground, but still strong willed and powerful. Bakura wanted to forget the most recent losses, but he owed it to them to remember them as he remembered all others. He knew he hadn’t been in the realm for long, but the darkness drowned the idea of time and the scope of the world outside, and he began to wonder how long it had been. He knew when he found out he’d been in the ring for three thousand years, he’d long since lost all idea that it had been that long, unable to count the millions of hours, and could only consider an eternity, but he didn’t remember when it shifted from real time into no time. He knew it had probably only been days or weeks since he’d been banished again, but there was a nagging feeling he couldn’t shake that years could have passed without his knowledge and Marik and Ryou could have grown old and died without him. It’s not like it mattered – he wasn’t getting out of here, so even if they hadn’t died yet, they would. His unmoving heart resigned to the fact that in all his forms, in all his reincarnations, he would always lose someone, and he was tired. For the first time, he was ready to stop. He was willing to let himself disappear into the darkness.

However, the darkness was not so fast to consume his soul, damaged and wounded though it was. Bakura was simply left alone to think and remember, with pain, everything he’d lost again.

It was difficult to consider Marik and Ryou in a different way to what he was used to. Losing his family and friends in Kul Elna had been a brutal massacre, a raid by the Pharaoh’s soldiers. It had been a merciless and seemingly unending killing, to harvest the bodies of an entire village, simply to burn them for some shiny trinkets.

Bakura often wished he hadn’t hidden. At the time there was no option, as the soldiers had arrived at the village, he’d been playing with some other little boys towards the far edge of the village, and when they heard the screaming, they had scattered, running blindly. However, Bakura was smarter than a lot of the kids his age, always precocious, and he sought out safety, skirting around the outside of the buildings. He watched around corners and saw the slaughter of people he loved. He pushed it from his mind, unable to process anything other than safety, adrenaline rushing through his system, telling him to run, to hide. He worked his way around the outside of the village, fleeing from behind one building to the next. He saw children die, his playmates, the kids he caused trouble with in the market. He saw them bathed in their own blood and their bodies being dragged away. Still, Bakura kept moving. When the screaming stopped, and silence fell over the village, he knew in his heart that all were dead. He stared out at his village, where doors hung open, trails of blood from the people that had been pulled from their homes and slain, and he knew the lifeless figures of his family must be out there. To seek them out would mean certain death, so he remained hidden, watching from the shadows as the soldiers collected the remains of the dead and threw them onto a cart at the village gates. The disrespect at his loved ones burned in his soul.

When the soldiers called out to each other, confirming the job was complete and there were no survivors to tell the tale of the Kul Elna massacre, they mounted their horses and took the corpses away, covered in dark cloths. It could have been anything in the cart, and Bakura knew no-one would suspect a thing when they took them back to the Pharaoh.

It was over.

Bakura slid down the building that was concealing him, and sank to the floor as the hooves faded into nothing across the stone and sand. He didn’t know how long he sat there for, trying to build up the courage to examine the real extent of the damage, but a stronger part of him told him not to even look.

He was six years old. Things like this weren’t meant to happen to six-year olds. Things like this weren’t supposed to happen at all.

He finally crawled out from his shelter when it was starting to get dark. The first place he ran to was his home, only to find the smears of the blood of his parents, and immediately left again. He trailed around his empty town, reciting the name of every person he could not find. He couldn’t write, otherwise he would have written his list, but instead, he said them over and over in his head, determined not to forget a single one. He took a chalky stone and drew a symbol on every door, something that linked his memory to each person. He stayed that night in a stranger’s house which no-one had been in, so was free from blood.

He didn’t sleep. The village was full of ghosts now, and there was no true rest to be had. His head was full of ghosts now, and he didn’t know if he’d ever sleep again. When he shut his eyes, flashes of images cascaded through his mind, and he found it easier to stay sitting up all night, reciting names out loud, waiting for daylight to come.

The sun rose to find him still wide awake and ready to move on. Bakura knew he had to get out of Kul Elna, because surely someone would be back to clear up the evidence of the soldier’s slaughter. So, he gathered as much food and water into a pack and started his walk. He took clothes to keep warm during the freezing desert nights, as he now had no home, he didn’t know where he would stop to rest. He walked for several hours, unsure whether he was any closer to another village or any sort of settlement where he might be able to seek solace, until finally, he saw some buildings on the horizon. He kept moving forward.

The buildings were scant, a small village inhabited by less than a hundred people. He had learned how to swipe a little food from the market by the time he was four years old, so he was able to stock up his supplies, taking water from the small river they had settled by, and as night was falling, he found himself a corner out of the wind to sleep in. Exhausted, he found himself drifting off quickly.

The years passed like this, as he grew older, becoming more adept at taking food and money and things he could sell, before moving on. As time passed, he hardened, against the climate and against other people. He was fast and agile, and he had made himself strong, and able to outrun anyone. His goal became to get to the glittering city where the Pharaoh resided, and to personally take his life. The Pharaoh that had order the massacre had died, but now his son took his place, and he would die by Bakura’s hand. He had made a name for himself, although few could put a face to the name of Thief King. As he travelled, drawing closer to the great pyramids and he realised, he would desecrate the Pharaoh’s tomb the way the Pharaoh had desecrated his entire village. It would be justice.

What he had not expected, however, was the great darkness that haunted the tombs, and when confronted with an evil being, who offered him its almighty power, Bakura was not hesitant to agree. His soul was torn open and Zorc embedded itself inside its new host. Bakura’s soul was broken in a new way, and he was almost incapable of controlling the new surge of energy and rage that now lived inside himself.

Now, an incredibly dangerous force, he was all but unstoppable, and he became an infamous tomb robber, easily breaking into the pyramids and underground resting places until years later, he was seized.

His mistake, he realised, as he was brought before the Pharaoh, was his self-assuredness and complacency. He had gotten lax with his attentiveness and he had walked directly into a trap. He should have been more careful, but at last, he realised the end of his wretched life was upon him. However, with Zorc in his soul, he was unable to be killed by a traditional means, and the Pharaoh told him, with a heavy tone, that his voice would be sealed in a golden ring.

Bakura looked warily at the item, he had learned from all the places he’d been to about the seven golden items that the Pharaoh had created, imbued with a very strong magic, all with wonderous and dangerous properties. There was much talk about how they had been created, but only Bakura knew the truth.

He spat at the Pharaoh’s feet and hissed two words.

“Kul Elna.”

He refused to speak after that, merely closing his eyes and allowing the ritual to begin. He had scoped out the room as soon as he was brought in, and these soldiers were much stronger than him, armed and many. He had no escape. While he could not merely die, he could still be wounded by the swords and spears they carried.

Countless years later, trapped inside the darkness of the Ring he didn’t remember his real name, and no-one was willing to find the clues to unlock his memory they had for Atem. Maybe it wasn’t so important to him anymore, after all, he’d procured a new name after the first host able to support him. Ryou Bakura had not resembled him the way that little Yugi resembled the Spirit of the Millennium Puzzle, but there had been enough likenesses in their souls that Ryou’s soul had not been blown apart the way that so many others that thought they could possess the ring had.

Bakura had been surprised, such a mild-mannered and docile boy had the strongest soul he had ever had the pleasure of toying with. In the early days it had been impossible to suppress him effectively. He knew Ryou could hear him speaking in his mind, as he drove himself to the brink of insanity trying to evade the tormenting voice. He had tried to outrun the Spirit of the Ring, only to find it followed wherever he went. He tried to remove the ring from around his neck, only to find the tines embedded in his thin, pale chest.

The Spirit laughed at his terror.

Once the Millennium Puzzle had been assembled, he felt a new power awakening in him, one that allowed him to _finally_ force down Ryou’s soul into the confines of his Soul Room, a room he had peered inside but deemed too unimportant to truly explore. He could now take control of the body he was inhabiting. He made it his own.

Not to say Ryou didn’t fight back, to save his new friends, and took control of parts of _their_ body, and forced him to lose Shadow Games, and in retaliation, Bakura broke those parts. He watched from behind their eyes as Ryou took himself to the emergency room of the hospital, to repair the damage he had caused. It was not his intention to incapacitate his new vessel, but he often forgot to eat, or sleep, and when he relinquished control, Ryou was often on the verge of collapsing, and Bakura watched with mild interest as he tended to his weak form, eating, resting, and cleaning up wounds that had appeared on his skin, including those from the Ring piercing his chest. He was curious to find that the gentle boy had a great amount of survivalism and intelligence. Bakura respected him for that.

He did not respect Ryou’s way of trying to get to know the Spirit, however. He found that pathetic and weak-willed, and more than anything else, terribly curious. Was it possible for someone to be so compassionate that they would take pity on the monster that shared their body? He was not interested in becoming friends, or partners, or anything to anyone, ever again. It was simply too dangerous.

But he hadn’t banked on Marik Ishtar. He hadn’t banked on being able to lose someone again.


End file.
